Doctor Who expert Gavin Fuller reviews the second episode in the new
series of Doctor Who, BBC One.

The pre-credits sequence for Dinosaurs on a Spaceship screamed “romp” and this, by and large, is just what the viewers got. And despite the self-explanatory title, there was some weirdness that wasn’t even witnessed during the maddest excesses of late Seventies Who, when Douglas Adams was script editor. As well as dinosaurs and a spaceship, the frankly deranged contents list also included Queen Nefertiti of Egypt, an engine room that looked like a beach and two of the campest robots ever seen on screen (voiced by a pseudonymous Mitchell and Webb). And that was just for starters.

With the Doctor for some reason deciding to assemble a “gang” for this episode (à la Scooby Doo) we certainly had a different dynamic, but it leant an uneasy mix of the humorous and downright daft. One moment you had The Doctor, Rory and his dad Brian (played by Mark Williams) riding a triceratops to escape the camp robots, the next you had a sinister storyline concerning David Bradley’s decidedly nasty trader Solomon. This collision was somewhat jarring.

Even the selling point of dinosaurs, while being a chance to show how the revamped series could render them more effectively than in the Seventies (the effects of Jon Pertwee adventure Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ effects spring painfully to mind here), was, in the end, a sideshow to the main plot.

As the story drew to a close, the Doctor effectively acted as Solomon’s executioner, ensuring he was on his spaceship when it was sent to its fate as a diversion for incoming missiles. This showed a harsher side to the Time Lord’s character; yes it is not the first time he has knowingly been responsible for someone’s death and Solomon was probably getting his just desserts, but given the Doctor’s ethical stance, such instances can sit uneasily within the viewers. While it had its moments, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship veered firmly towards the sillier end of the programme’s spectrum; and while it showed that the programme can go to places that no other TV show can, it was ultimately a bit of a mess.